What is happened to the banister? Is it my mistake? Or a mistake of the camera?
The manager is angry. And maybe I'll have to redo the scans...
Someone notice other errors?
I also wrote to MT Support and I'm waitng for reply
Thanks a lot

I also had this issue once and the response I got from Matterport was there was possibly a loose connection to the tripod which allowed a wobble in the camera. I checked all my adapters and tightened everything and placed on a sturdy tripod and that resolved my wobble.

Thanks for including the screen shots, they are very helpful with understanding the issue. It likely you did nothing wrong. This type of geometry can be a bit challenging for the camera/software. It is certainly a area of the product we are working to improve, and in fact just yesterday we applied an update to the processing code to improve performance in this area. As it not 100% clear that your model was processed with this new code i would recommend re-uploading this model fro re-processing (don't worry about cost, processing of duplicate models is available free of charge). The Capture application may tell you that you cant upload because the model hasn't changed. In this case a minor change to the name will allow you to get around this issue.

Regards,

Bob

I did like they told me, but nothing happened. The banister is not alligned

Gary: I also tried like you told me, but nothing....

Ron0987: I think it's not a problem of the tripod. I bought the one recommended by the Matterport (Manfrotto)

I hope Matterport solve this problem. Because if I travel 100-200 Km. for a work and later the model is not good, it's a big problem.

I reply again to MT Support that I did like they told me but nothing it's happened

This is their response

Hello Gianpiero,

I have heard from engineering and wanted to pass along their feedback. It does appear that my initial thoughts were correct, basically that these anomalies are the result of a limitation of the current system. The primary challenge being that the small size of the cables in the railing are difficult to capture. Engineering is working to improve performance in this area. In the short term one suggestion to minimize this effect would be to disable the scan location (using workshop) closest to side of the railing. Disabling scan locations in workshop is no destructive meaning you can experiment until you get the best balance of navigation and appearance.

I run into this fairly often and what is happening is that as the camera makes its 360 sweep, it is stitching the photos together using the macro data set, rather than looking at micro data points (like a bannister) to align the photos of the sweep. As such, lines that should be straight, may have a slight jog in them. In reality the alignment may be off by no more than 2 - 3 cm. At a long focal length, it is unnoticeable, but in close it becomes more obvious. You will also see these issues in door frames and moldings.

In my experience, your best bet is to make sure that your camera is as close to perfect level as possible. That keeps the the plane of the sweep as close to perpendicular to the floor as possible. if it is off just a little but, your sweep arc may not align properly, resulting in "jogs" where the images are stitched together.

Never assume the floor you are scanning is level. You will often have to make level adjustments from sweep to sweep, especially near load bearing walls and doors.

Actually I'm very careful to the level. From sweep to sweep.
In future I will be even more
Never stop learning
The next step I'll do, it's delete all scans of the room (I maintain the first scan on the door) and rescan all, paying more attention at camera level and stay away from bannister.

What I would suggest is anytime you have such fine and details lines like in your rails of the banister that you do a single sweep of the room this way the rails should remain in alignment. The problem happens when multiple images are trying to stitch together and are captures at different angles.

Simply if you were to stand in one position and trace the rails and mover to another and do the same thing. When you overlay the two drawings together the rails will not align up.

a room with these fine lines can be a headache if you end up having black holes and need to do several scans so try and arrange you scan to capture as much as possible in one go or perhaps from locations which don't have a view of the rails.

Going up the stairs is another problem altogether and I'm not sure how to solve that one. you might try move you scans up several more steps at a time. You may be able to try all of the above by just removing some of your scans to see if it improves the overall job for that room. Lets us know if the above suggestions work.

Reading some of the responses, I think their is a misconception of how showcase view works compared to mesh. In mesh, the software uses all available scans to build a model that you can navigate in a true first person environment.

In showcase mode when you are "standing" on a circle, you only see the "hi def" view associated with that sweep. The software is not stitching in data from other sweeps each sweep view in showcase mode is independent of the other sweeps.

The alignment issue come from the photo stitching in each individual sweep. The camera takes 5 wide and high angle photos in each sweep (the pauses between the whirs.) it then stitches those together in to the globe the makes up each sweep. Even if the camera is perfectly level, floors, walls other feature are rarely perfectly plumb. Likewise, I have found that features like banisters that have long lines and exist out of the parallel plane to the floor are most susceptible to these issues.

There is not much you can do about it besides setting expectations with your clients, being as level as possible and making sure your tripod is stable and quick release is tight to the camera.

That should work, but you still have to capture the whole banister in one photo. At a distance that should be easy enough, but as you get closer you're still going to run into the same issue. I've never had a client mention it to me and overall it doesn't really detract from the model as a whole.

I have an apt to talk to some of the matterport team next week. I will ask them about how the photos are stitched together. It does seem to me that it is not along a vertical line but rather a series of arcs/parabolas that so that the photos have significant overlap. If that is the case it means your margin for error in getting a straight-on shot is smaller.

@dfellars That's a great question that you propose about the stitching among the six images. Thanks for asking Matterport about your "arcs/parabolas" overlap question.

When the camera is close-up to "challenging" spaces (since as the thin rail wires in the banister), it does "seam" like position the camera to capture this portion in the "sweet spot" of just one of the still images.

Might be a "best practice" to always think about the camera position in relationship to the most likely challenging elements to stitch.

I have not had chance to speak with Matterport yet, but after going through some of my old scans and I think I know the problem.

It is not where it stitches the 6 images together, but where the 3 images that make up each of those six images are stitched together.

The Matterport camera is actually 3 separate camera units, each with three sensors. The higher resolution showcase images have to be stitched together top to bottom, before they can be combined into the 360 degree view. It looks on these photos and scans of my own that the error is occurring at the top to bottom stitch... not the left to right stitch.

The good news is that this is something that can likely be fixed with a firmware/app update.

The bad news is that it doesn't matter where we aim the camera, we're at the mercy of the software.